I. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to radio communications. More particularly, the present invention relates to provisioning resources in a radiotelephone network.
II. Description of the Related Art
Cellular radiotelephone networks provide mobile radiotelephone subscribers access to the land-line public switched telephone network (PSTN). FIG. 1 illustrates a typical prior art example of such a radiotelephone network.
This network is comprised of a number of base stations (104-109) that use multiple radio transceivers to communicate with the mobile subscriber (130). The base stations are controlled by base station controllers (101-103) that are coupled to a central switch (100), referred to in the art as the mobile switching center (MSC).
The MSC (100) is a point of access to the PSTN (120). The MSC (100) supervises and controls connections between the PSTN (120) and mobile subscribers (130). Any combination of calls are made possible by the MSC (100): land-to-land, mobile-to-land, land-to-mobile, or mobile-to-mobile. The MSC (100) is well known in the art and is therefore not described further.
This network and its elements are generic to multiple types of radiotelephone systems such as the advanced mobile phone system (AMPS), Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) time division multiple access (TDMA), and code division multiple access (CDMA). These standards are described in greater detail in their respective specifications available from the Electronic Industries Association/Telecommunications Industry Association (EIA/TIA).
In addition to functioning as the interface to the public land-line network, the above described switch also controls all of the subsystems required for the cellular system. These subsystems include radio channel units, cell site equipment, mobile subscriber billing, and system operational measurement software that are responsible for determining the operational measurements of the switch.
Operational measurements, as is well known in the cellular art, are counters for the events that occur in a cellular switch. These call-related events include, for example, the activity that takes place within the switch such as mobile-to-land calls, mobile-to-mobile calls, land-to-mobile calls, hand-offs, three-way calls, and dropped calls. Different systems have various operational measurements depending on the system requirements and features offered by the system operator.
The radiotelephone systems have various resources that must be allocated to the radiotelephone subscribers. These resources include system memory and radios. The resources are allocated by estimating the resources required when certain call features (call forwarding, conference calling, etc.) are in use by the system operator. The estimation technique's drawback is that the amount of resources can be under or overestimated.
Underestimating the required resources will cause service degradation and possibly a system reset since not enough memory is set aside for the traffic. Overestimating causes greater expense for the system operator due to the high cost of memory and other hardware.